While the coalition has been arguing since it first filed its case in 2017 that Georgia’s voting machines aren’t secure enough, Halderman’s audit - approved by a federal court in Georgia in 2021 - confirmed a number of easy-to-hack security holes.
But he’s finding himself in a different position now. Raffensperger’s refusal made him an icon of election integrity at the time. Fox News, which fueled those baseless allegations in its news coverage, eventually paid Dominion nearly $800 million to resolve a defamation suit the company had filed against it.Ī recording of a phone call revealed Trump also pressured Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia. “Even if there’s no actual attack, you better believe that there are people who are going to use the existence of these problems to call into question the results of elections.”įollowing the 2020 elections, then-president Donald Trump alleged Dominion Voting Systems had conspired with a bizarre cast of characters to steal the election from him. Raffensperger’s decision not to fix these systems represents “the height of irresponsibility,” Halderman said in an interview. And Hassinger argued that it would be riskier to rush out the available fixes by 2024 because they are substantial and have not yet been tested in a major election.īut a chorus of cybersecurity analysts and election-security experts argue that there’s enough lead time right now to make changes and that fixing a documented issue with the machines is the best way to prevent vote-tampering or disinformation in 2024.
The secretary of state says in the letter that Georgia has effective controls in place - just as it did in 2020, when multiple audits, investigations and a state-wide recount disproved baseless allegations of widespread fraud.
“If the PhDs don’t like being put in the same category as the Pillow salesman, tough noogies. “The paranoiacs and conspiracists of the world have their beliefs reinforced when they read reports of theoretical ‘vulnerabilities’ that fail to mention the real-world security measures already in place,” said Mike Hassinger, spokesperson for the secretary of state’s office. The state has maintained throughout the court challenge that it has adequate controls to prevent fraud, but Raffensperger’s letter to legislators ramps up the rhetoric and shows that the fight for the legitimacy of the 2024 vote in Georgia is already well under way. Georgia is one of just two states in the country to use these ballot-marking devices as the primary form of voting across every precinct, and the plaintiffs - a Georgia-focused non-profit group called the Coalition for Good Governance - have alleged its dependence on them is unacceptably risky because of the way the ImageCastX records voter’s choices: via machine-printed barcodes voters can’t corroborate with their own eyes. They are real, they are there, and they must be addressed.”īefore its release last week, the analysis of Dominion Voting Systems’ ImageCastX ballot-marking devices was kept under seal for roughly two years as part of a long-running legal dispute between Raffensperger and local voting rights activists arguing the machines need to be replaced by hand-marked paper ballots. “But we cannot, out of fear of that confusion, stop talking about these vulnerabilities.
“Raffensperger has lumped us with the election deniers,” said David Jefferson, a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and an expert on election technology. But Raffensperger’s dismissive reaction to the unsparing audit conducted by security expert Alex Halderman has turned him into an object of intense criticism from cybersecurity specialists, who say he is painting legitimate research with the brush of far-right conspiracy theories - and imperiling the 2024 elections in the process.
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